Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Are You Hungry?

I remember Oprah several years ago talking about buying a cow for a family - she was hooked up with this organization called Heifer International.

I'm an Iowa girl and I know about heifers. We raised them when I was younger. I bought my first car by selling a heifer I had been given by my dad. That car opened up the world for me. Giving a heifer to a hungry family will change their entire lives!

I have never had to worry about being hungry. I'm one of the lucky ones. Here's some statistics for you from library.thinkquest.org

Every year 15 million children die of hunger

For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years

Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children died from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving. Over 4 million will die this year.

One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture

Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. UNICEF

3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day.

One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.

Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.

Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death

To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.

Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger

It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year

What can you do? The most obvious answer is give money. Visit www.heifer.org

When a family has a cow, every morning there's a glass of rich milk for the children to drink before heading off to school. Classes are paid with the income from the sale of milk, and there's even enough to share with the neighbors.

A good dairy cow can produce four gallons of milk a day - enough for a family to drink and share with neighbors. Milk protein transforms sick, malnourished children into healthy boys and girls. The sale of surplus milk earns money for school fees, medicine, clothing and home improvements.

Better still, every gift multiplies, as the animal's first offspring is passed on to another family-then they also agree to pass on an animal, and so on.

And because a healthy cow can produce a calf every year, every gift will be passed on and eventually help an entire community move from poverty to self reliance. Now that's a gift worth giving!